Reflection On Past Teaching Experience

1.2 Reflection of Past Teaching Experiences

Every so often I heard the teachers in the school where I did my teaching practicum were discussing about how their pupils did not even know how to properly write the correct spelling of some of the English word even though they were quite familiar with the word. The same spelling issue also had risen during my teaching and learning session as I caught them asking their other classmates on how to write the spelling of certain words and yet they still incorrectly wrote the word on their exercise book as their classmate gave the wrong spelling of the word as well.

“…eh, how you spell castle?...” (FN/PW/NIF)

During the nine months duration of teaching practical in three different schools located

For instance, the word marked using red pen in the figure above was one of the spelling mistakes that the pupils did. As we could see, the word that the pupil meant to write was “Trying”, but instead he wrote “Tri ing”. This happened probably because the pupils might have thought that the spelling of “try“ was actually spelled “tri” since both spelling sounded the same although they have different meaning and also because they were influenced by their mother tongue. Even though the words were initially provided with meaning or they have heard and see the words being mentioned before, still the pupils were unable to determine the correct spelling of some of the word. Furthermore, the pupils were also made other spelling mistake in their work. Among the repeatedly occurred spelling mistake made by the pupils were missing a letter in the word, invented or created new word arrangement but sounded exactly the same as the correct spelling of the same word, exchanging of letters in the word that produces the same